Existing User

At a time when the conquest of planet Earth is an accomplished
fact, natural resources have fallen prey to the interest of
Capital. Reaching the top of the Himalayas has a financial value,
and not even mountaineering, increasingly portrayed as a
progressive form of tourism, is safe from this exploitation.

If, as Fredric Jameson once said, 'it seems to be easier for us
today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and
of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism,' this may not be
just due to a weakness in our imagination, but a serious
threat.1 Artistic practices such as Ibon
Aranberri's emerge with a questioning attitude toward their natural
environment and its constructed representations, in which tasks
such as marching, exploring limits and excavating ruins frame a new
field of experience.

Aranberri's most ambitious and yearning project is still to
come. Visualising the fragments that will compose this new work
implies an imaginary process and a commitment to an actual need for
action, observation and reflection. His intuitive, accumulative,
laconic and multi-faceted technique makes the viewers follow the
tracks of his previous works, which become pretexts for a future
personal challenge. The project is described by the artist as a
mountain documentary, which he will deconstruct and reconstruct
again under a new cosmos. In its current state, its mixture of
references - following the concentric influence of the spiral and
the allegorical form of the map - reveal a methodology in which
fortuitous decisions can become the focus of interpretation, but
where all the elements interact within a shared horizon.
Aranberri's aspiration to this totality is not nostalgic but
explicitly 'totalitarian'. It

Footnotes

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994, p.xii.↑

Related Features

Journal

Almost 30 years after the death of General Francisco Franco and
the end of his dictatorial regime, the last equestrian monument to
the Generalísimo (in his hometown, Ferrol, Galicia) was dismantled
amid much controversy...

Journal

Journal

When thinking about Taro Shinoda in terms of machines and
movies, it is not Fritz Lang's Metropolis that springs to mind. Nor
the many Frankensteins, or Captain Nemo's Nautilus in 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea...

Journal

Since the second half of the 1990s the field of activity upon
which Japanese artists ply their trade has expanded from the local
to the international. Most of the artists from this generation were
influenced by various subcultures...

Journal

Mari Paz Balibrea returns to the project ‘On Capital and
Territory’ to explore its Lefebvrian underpinnings, and, in
particular, its treatment of Andalusia, a region marked both by
branded stereotype and an inflated real estate market.

Books

In this book, Julian Jason Haladyn argues that Marcel Duchamp's intention in his final artwork, Étant donnés, was not to provide a neat summation of his career, but the opposite: to question and even undermine definitive readings of his own previous work.